It appears I won't be teaching this semester.
Was it something I said?
Probably.
So instead of letting my mind, what's left of it, go to waste, I have decided to plow into the syllabus from a Brown German Studies course, Post Catastrophic Narratives: Memory and Post Memory in German Literature after 1945.
GRMN 2662P. Postcatastrophic Narratives: Memory and Postmemory in German Literature after 1945. German culture after 1945 is determined by a changing relation toward its past: the horrors of National Socialism. This past was repressed, then gradually recognized, until it emerged as an essential part of German identity & politics in the 1980s. Literature played a role as a counter-memory of what had been officially forgotten, adopting a radically modern aesthetics to engage with Adorno’s dictum that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Literature attempts to represent the unrepresentable, developing a different poetics of memory and postmemory, in part with a political dimension that finds echoes in today’s postcolonial debates. After an introduction to the historical context & clarification of key concepts such as trauma, postmemory, & the politics of memory, we will discuss seminal texts by Paul Celan, W. G. Sebald, Alexander Kluge, Wolfgang Koeppen, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Uwe Johnson & others
I've started with Ernestine Schlant's book, The Languages of Silence, 1997.
And wow.
Immediately I see connection to my German History rabbit hole of the past year coming to fruition. Schlant references the the Adorno line: Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, but what hit me harder was how the Holocaust confronted (and destroyed) the Enlightenment idea that humanity is progressing, especially as it is laid bare in Wolfgang Koeppen's Death In Rome.
It must be so uncomfortable to confront the barbarity of our species. To speak of it honestly and authentically takes courage and, honestly, some sort of thick skin I can't really fathom.
Another thought is how I previously discovered Sebald's Austerlitz via an interview with the incredible Paul Beatty, who set his Slumberland in Berlin.
I know you're dying to know how this goes so I'll be sure to post often in this sabbatical of sorts.
Be well my friends, and please remember the line from The Holdovers, "Life for a lot of people is like a hen house ladder: shitty and short."
